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70 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 leadership skills, and bringing together the knowledge they already have with new con- cepts into one core platform. That's the bene- fit of any certification program. It gives you a core foundation where you can see how every- thing interrelates. That's why you get certified. It's not because it's better or worse than a degree. It's because you stop what you're doing, take a gut check, and make sure that you organize all your learning into one foun- dation that says, "This is how all this comes together to better focus on the critical skills I need for my job." Plaza: I wanted to pick that up because the point you just made circles us back to when we were talking about why students get involved in the live training rather than just watching the recorded sessions. It's because they can work on a larger sample size of experience in order to learn how to generalize what you're teaching. Mucha: Exactly. Another piece that makes this particular program a little bit different than oth- ers is the people who work in the same indus- try—they might be competitors—are all getting together. It's cool when they discover there's more than one way to do their job and that they all have the same challenges. It's impor- tant to bring out because this is a stressful position for many EMS companies. Whether folks have been in the industry a long time, or they've only worked at one company, some- times, they start to think their company is the only one that has these problems. When they discover that everybody else in class deals with the same issues, it helps and gives them more self-confidence in how they do their jobs. It also gives them a better feel- ing about the company they're working in because with the customers they see as "prob- lem customers," they start to realize that it's not just their particular problem, but it hap- pens throughout the industry. Johnson: It's the danger of being a program manager. You are very accountable for the success of a program. Usually, you have no direct reports. You're a dotted line influencer through your customer and your organization to make all this happen—very little authority but a whole lot of accountability. It takes a lot of charm to do this job. Plaza: TQM is really more relevant today, and the belt system that kind of systematizes them and markets them. What you're talking about is the ability to learn something new and apply it. You have to look at something, take into account new technology—which is more prevalent today even than the '70s and '80s when this started—be able to capitalize on it, or look for the potential problems down the road. What you're telling people is that the number one ability needed in the 21st century is to learn and apply new things. Matties: It's what I've called just-in-time (JIT) training because you can come in, learn some- thing, and apply it the next day to what you're doing. It has a real benefit. Mucha: Exactly. And in that particular role, the ROI is pretty significant if a program manager changes their performance even a little bit. Matties: Exactly. Now, one of the things that we talked a lot about is alignment, meaning the ability to get people to move into a com- mon direction. One of the greatest alignment moments in history is when JFK said we're going to go to the moon. That aligned every- body. You could ask someone working on com- puters, "What are you doing?" and they would say, "We're going to the moon." So would someone, say, sweeping the floors. The power of that alignment is the key to success. How do you deal with alignment in your training, and how does it translate back into the companies that your students are in? Mucha: We don't call it alignment in our train- ing. We call it team building and motivation, but it's the same concept as we talk about goal setting and how important it is that everybody has input into that goal. In the leadership por- tion of the course, there is a focus on align- ment, but we don't label it as such.